I sent you a cable urging you to send me the
articles about Germany immediately. When I sent
it I thought that I was going to publish the article
with some of our own comments on it. After further
reflection, however, I decided that it would
be a terrible misfortune to the movement in this
country, either as you view it or as I view it, to
have this article or your letter published now. And
so I am neither going to publish it in The Liberator,
nor send it elsewhere unless I receive a direct
mandate from you.

It is impossible to go into the whole situation
in a letter, but I can say this much: I notice
that you still believe in the class struggle, and I
can assure you that many a capitalist editor would
pay a big price for this article as ammunition to
be used against labor in that struggle. For me that
is enough and I hope it will be enough for you. I
want to add that I have reached this decision only
after consulting not only Floyd [Dell], but John
Reed and Arturo Giovannitti – the latter still an
uncompromising syndicalist and more opposed
to political Socialism than ever. They all agree with
me that while the facts in your article so far as
they are uninterpreted by you are valuable and
ought to be known, and while the article itself is
an extremely brilliant piece of journalism, your
point of view which you force upon the reader
with extraordinary vigor is fundamentally counterrevolutionary.
The bourgeois ideology of freedom
carried to an absolute, constitutes the revolution
for you – as also for [Lincoln] Steffens.
The revolution is an economic change, and ought
to ignore bourgeois ideology altogether in order
to give to the working class, through a process of
state formation and state decay which is quite
clearly conceived by Lenin and by all the rest of
the revolutionists, a real freedom in the end.

This sounds hasty and didactic but only because
it is an attempt to sum up in a very brief
and highly abstract form the many conclusions
about you and Steffens, and about your article,
upon which all of us four very different people
are absolutely agreed. I hope to God you won’t
insist upon its being published.

Perhaps in view of this great difference in
our opinions you won’t feel like sending us the
German story. I still hope you will, however, for I
have an idea that your account of a revolution in
the state which the German revolution has reached
when you were there could inspire the workers in
their struggle in this country instead of supplying
ammunition to the capitalists.

* * * *

About your stuff in the World, I did feel sure
that some of those sentences could not have been
yours, even if you had gone crazy. I remember
particularly picking out that sentence about
Chicherin’s “insolence” and saying, “Bob never
could have written that.” You will understand,
however, that I was not thinking of you so much
as I was thinking of the effect of those stories on
the movement in this country in what I wrote.
The article by Mr. X. I did not see before it was
published as I was in the West at the time. And
although I suggested its being written I think if I
had seen it when it was written I should not have
published it. I enclose another article about you
which I made out of paragraphs from your letters
given to me by Vera Zaliasnik when I spoke in
San Francisco. I do not know what you will fell
like doing in the light of all this, but my advice to
you is to let the whole matter of the World interview
stop just where it is until you get back and
find out at first hand what the conditions are in
this country. In your perfectly unmixed devotion
to the truth as you see it over there, you naturally
do not realize as we do the very different meaning
which much of what you say acquires over here. I
wish you would wait. And if you do send other
stories I wish you would tell me definitely whether
I can have the privilege of cutting them in any
respect in view of the situation here. I need not
tell you that we are all very sad about the point of
view you are taking in the international revolution
which is in progress. It seems to us impractical
and sentimental when it is of the utmost importance
if it ever was in history, to be practical
and scientific.

We may seem a little top lofty in thinking
we understand you so well, but we love you as
ever and wish you would come back home.